Much more here.

Photos of carnivorous plants here. This is a Pinguicula Titan.

Bob Grant in The Scientist.com

Evolution, by its very nature, is a dynamic process. But just as fluid are humankind’s efforts to understand, describe, and conceptualize that process. Out went Lamarck, in came Darwin. Mendel’s insights set the rules for genetic inheritance, then certain exceptions to Mendel’s rules materialized. So forth and so on.

The most recent, broadly recognized codification of evolutionary theory is known as the Modern Synthesis. After nearly 3 decades of theorizing, experimentation, and writing by paragons of evolutionary thought—Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright, to name but a few—British biologist Julian Huxley cemented the term in 1942 with the publication of his book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The theoretical framework brought Darwin’s ideas into the 20th century and married them to the gene’s-eye-view of biology that was emerging at the start of the century, with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s inheritance research.

According to the Modern Synthesis, populations containing some level of genetic variation evolve via changes in gene frequency induced mostly by natural selection. Phenotypic changes are gradual, and speciation and diversification into higher taxonomic levels come about over long periods of change. These ideas have remained largely unchallenged for more than a half-century.

But since the 1940s, science’s concept of evolutionary dynamics has, well, evolved. Indeed, these days, calling the Modern Synthesis “modern” might be a stretch.

Some evolutionary biologists say that the body of knowledge concerning evolutionary processes has simply outgrown the confines of the Modern Synthesis, which was crafted before science had a strong grasp of genomics, molecular biology, developmental biology, and other, more recently derived disciplines, such as systems biology.

A gallery of 14 images at the UK Telegraph, here.

Full list and portfolio from Discover here.

From Live Science:

We’ve loved. We’ve learned. And we’ve had some of our sexual suspicions confirmed by scientific research. As 2009 comes to a close, LiveScience looks back at the year’s nine most intriguing sex lessons.

Sex smells. A man’s sweat smells different when he’s sexually aroused — and women can tell the difference between the smell of sexual sweat and the regular stuff, according to a study in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Pulling out works. Well, most of the time. In a paper published in the June issue of Conception magazine, researchers claimed that withdrawal was “almost as effective as the male condom” when it came to pregnancy prevention (a failure rate of 18 percent, vs. the 17 percent failure rate of condoms).

Child’s play. An Iowa State University study found that 25 percent of children — ranging in ages from 11 to 16 — in low-income households reported having sex. The average age of first intercourse for that group was 12.77.

Growing pains. According to a study from the University of Turin, penis extenders might work — a particular brand that used traction to gradually stretch the penis over time was found to increase flaccid members’ length by almost one inch.

That’s a hair from the inner ear. Full gallery here.

From Pajamas Media:

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed ^[1] three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “Climategate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer code, and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material, and that sought for years by CEI, goes to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation, and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

CEI sought the following documents, among others. NASA’s failure to provide them within thirty days will prompt CEI to file suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:

– Internal discussions about NASA’s quiet correction of its false historical U.S. temperature records after two Canadian researchers discovered a key statistical error, specifically: discussion about whether and why to correct certain records, how to do so, the impact, or wisdom, or potential (or real) fallout there from or reaction to doing so (requested August 2007).

– Internal discussions relating to the email sent to James Hansen and/or Reto A. Ruedy from a Stephen (Steve) McIntyre calling their attention to the errors in NASA/GISS online temperature data (August 2007).

– Those relating to the content, importance, or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files and expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.

This, and the related political activism engaged in, are inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee, particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.

In a long post from September, Bishop Hill recounts the attempt of scientist Steve McIntyre to obtain the original data behind some studies showing global warming to be a man-made phenomena (AGW — anthropogenic global warming).

Some of McIntyre’s research into Polar Urals deserves a story in its own right, but it is one that will have to wait for another day. We can pick up the narrative again in 2005, when McIntyre discovered that an update to the Polar Urals series had been collected in 1999.

Through a contact he was able to obtain a copy of the revised series. Remarkably, in the update the eleventh century appeared to be much warmer than in the original – in fact it was higher even than the twentieth century. This must have been a severe blow to paleoclimatologists, a supposition that is borne out by what happened next, or rather what didn’t: the update to the Polar Urals was not published, it was not archived and it was almost never seen again.

If you have time, read it all.

Legitimate science works when researchers open their data and research methods to any and all, so that scientists can either replicate their findings or not.

Even advocates of AGW must admit that bad science is bad science.

Born with a retinal disease that made him legally blind, and would eventually leave him totally sightless, the nine-year-old boy used to sit in the back of the classroom, relying on the large print on an electronic screen and assisted by teacher aides. Now, after a single injection of genes that produce light-sensitive pigments in the back of his eye, he sits in front with classmates and participates in class without extra help. In the playground, he joins his classmates in playing his first game of softball.

His treatment represents the next step toward medical science’s goal of using gene therapy to cure disease. Extending a preliminary study published last year on three young adults, the full study reports successful, sustained results that showed notable improvement in children with congenital blindness.

Check out this interactive graphic that demonstrates the relative size of things.

Be sure to grab the slider control and move it to the right.

New Scientist

JUST months – that’s how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or “Big Freeze”. It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.

The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.

Patrick Michaels in National Review.

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end.

The ease with which anyone can construct just about any climate argument he wants has to do with the inconstant nature of climate itself. The sun warms the earth, but the amount of energy it radiates changes (right now it’s pretty cold). The earth’s surface is dominated by two very different substances — uneven rocks and large, smooth oceans — so internal climate oscillations and accidents happen as well.

Temperatures seesaw up and down depending upon ever-changing currents of air in the tropical atmosphere and oceans, including El Niño in the Pacific and other weather features elsewhere. They can be either cold or warm. When the warm ones are absent or weak for a decade or so — a common occurrence — temperatures may stay the same or even fall. When there’s a huge warm phase in El Niño, global temperatures rise, as they did in 1998, setting records that have yet to be broken.

Finally, there’s carbon dioxide itself. We put it in the air whenever we burn pretty much anything, be it in a power plant or in an automobile. Everything else being equal, that will warm temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Just how much is the subject of a great scientific debate that has yet to be resolved.

And everything else is never equal. Cold portions of El Niño and a cold sun can completely halt carbon-dioxide–induced warming (and clearly have for more than ten years now). And this behavior creates a fertile environment for criticism of the projections of computer models for this century.

Obama-weather.com. Seriously.

For a truly serious discussion of weather prediction, there is this from New Scientist:

WE’VE all watched those vast heaps of cotton wool float across the sky. Lofted and shaped by updrafts of warm air, cumulus clouds mesmerise with their constantly changing shape. Some grow ever taller, while others wither and die before our eyes. All bear witness to the ceaseless roiling of the ocean of air we call the atmosphere.

About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of such clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple.

Even at the time, with scientific meteorology still in its infancy, the idea seemed absurd: key equations governing the behaviour of the 5 million billion tonnes of air above us had already been identified – and they were anything but simple.

No one was more aware of this than Richardson, who is recognised as one of the founders of modern weather forecasting. Even now, the world’s most powerful computers are pushed to their limits extracting predictions of future weather and climate from the equations he wrestled with using pencil and paper.

Yet Richardson suspected that behind the mathematical complexity of the atmosphere lay a far simpler reality – if only we looked at it the right way. (more…)

In the hope of helping oncologists remove every piece of tumor tissue during surgery, researchers are developing new imaging tools that work in real time in the operating room. European researchers have now demonstrated that a chemical analysis instrument called a mass spectrometer can be coupled with an electroscalpel to create a molecular profile of tissue during surgery. The researchers have shown that the method can be used to map out different tissue types and distinguish cancerous tissue. The device will begin clinical trials next month.

…Takáts realized that some surgical cutting tools, including electroscalpels, produce gaseous ions as a kind of waste product that are suitable for analysis with mass spectrometry. And these fumes, often called “surgical smoke,” are already collected during surgery because they’re harmful to the lungs. Takáts and his collaborators found that mass spectrometry of surgical smoke can be used to make a molecular map of a tumor. After the fumes are sucked into the mass spectrometer, the chemicals in the sample are identified and checked against a database to give the surgeon a readout. Gathering and analyzing a chemical sample takes a few hundred milliseconds. “We can draw a map and say this part is healthy liver, that is connective tissue, this is adipose tissue, that is cancer,” says Takáts.

WSJ:

Hats off to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak, the three American scientists awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday. Their cell research demonstrates that we’re on the cusp of an era of medical innovation that could radically improve lives and life spans, if government lets it blossom.

The trio was honored for discovering how chromosomes act to protect themselves from degrading when cells divide by using an enzyme called telomerase. Subsequent studies have found that telomerase is closely tied to aging and human cancers, and work on the enzyme has become a popular area of drug research. Their discoveries “have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies,” said the prize committee.

It’s worth noting that the British-born Szostak and the Australian-born Blackburn are immigrants who chose to work at U.S. research institutions, which continue to be the world’s best. Low-skill foreigners tend to dominate the immigration debate, but if the U.S. is to remain a leader in scientific innovation, we’ll need to keep our borders open to the world’s top talent. We’ll also need to protect those institutions from the budget ravages of government-controlled medicine.

HT: Tigerhawk.

Full story and more photos here.

Patrick Michaels in National Review:

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Read it all.

…scientists at the University of Minnesota have identified the genes in cannabis that allow the plant to produce THC. Finding the genes opens the path to either create drug-free hemp plants for industrial purposes, or to develop plants with much higher concentrations of the psychotropic chemical.

Hmm.

The evil food industry could breed special stoner potato chips where the more you eat, the hungrier you get.

Or perhaps there really will be a reason to smoke banana peels.

And where does the “potential to exist” originate? Cool video, thoough.

Jay M. Pasachoff

It’s two days after the eclipse, and we are still euphoric. We spent the rest of eclipse day packing up equipment, staying over at our Tianhuangping aerie. Bit by bit over the Internet, we learned of other sites: it rained at one of the other sites that we had seriously considered (the coast near Shanghai) and was foggy at the other (Moganshan, at 300 m of altitude). Suzhou, where we are now, was rainy also. And Wuhan, the other big city in the path, hundreds of miles west, had visibility through clouds, as we had, though from photos, our site seemed a bit better. As I say to everyone every few hours, “We-were-incredibly-lucky!”

Yesterday, the main part of our team of scientists and students came down the mountain, detouring by the “tidal bore,” a phenomenon of nature not related to eclipses. In a tidal bore, as the tide reverses, a row of waves moves up river against the current. We have read that the tidal bore was 10 meters high here, the highest in the world, but then heard that yesterday’s was “only” 1 to 2 meters high. Still, our group was glad we went. It was interesting to see a surfable row of waves come up river, in view for 15 minutes before it reached us. It extended perhaps a kilometer, as far as the eye could see, across the wide estuary that leads from the Pacific west to Hangzhou. And then it left standing waves after it went by.

David Harsanyi in Reason:

Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—better known as the “science czar”—has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged but never right.

And thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s, called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, online.

In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions.

It’s not surprising. Holdren spent the ’70s boogying down to the vibes of an imaginary population catastrophe and global cooling. He also participated in the famous wager between scientist Paul Ehrlich, the now-discredited Population Bomb theorist (and co-author of Ecoscience), and economist Julian Simon, who believed human ingenuity would overcome demand.

Holdren was asked by Ehrlich to pick five natural resources that would experience shortages because of human consumption. He lost the bet on all counts, as the composite price index for the commodities he picked, including copper and chromium, fell by more than 40 percent.

Then again, it’s one thing to be a bumbling soothsayer but quite another to underestimate the resourcefulness of mankind enough to ponder how “population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution,” as Holdren did in Ecoscience in 1977.

The book, in fact, is sprinkled with comparable statements that passively discuss how coercive population control methods might rescue the world from … well, humans.

When I called Holdren’s office, I was told that the czar “does not now and never has been an advocate of compulsory abortions or other repressive measures to limit fertility.”

LiveScience:

When Tufts University Assistant Chemistry Professor Charles Sykes says he loves playing with blocks, he’s not referring to the typical kids’ toys. Instead, he’s talking about his fascination with seeing atoms and molecules move on a computer screen in front of him and using technology to move the molecules himself to see how they react to various surfaces.

“I never get bored looking at pictures of atoms,” said Sykes, who holds the Usen Family Career Development Assistant Professorship at Tufts University. “Atoms and molecules are the building blocks of life, but it has only been in the last 25 years that we have been able to see them and in the last 15 years that we have been able to play with them.”

In the lab, Sykes and his students explore questions related to nanoscience, or the study of things that are one billionth of a meter in size — 80,000 times thinner than a human hair. To see molecules, they use scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs), which use electrons instead of light to make it possible to see things as small as individual atoms.

Their goal is to understand how atoms and molecules interact with surfaces, and to build novel nanoscale structures by controlling these interactions. Theoretically, each molecule could be assigned a single task, creating ultra-tiny devices more than 10 million times smaller than some of the gadgets we use today, Sykes explained.

“Such machines are seen everywhere in nature. They perform tasks as varied as powering the motion of cells and even driving whole body locomotion through muscle contraction. However, mankind has not been able to create this molecular motion in nanoscale devices,” said Sykes.

That means the first step for the Sykes team is to turn molecules into motors. (more…)

Sunspots have been in short supply, which has a bearing on global climate. Hint: That’s why the earth has not been heating for more than a decade.

Discover:

The sun has been surprisingly quiet lately, and until now astronomers couldn’t figure out why. An 11-year cycle governs solar flares and sunspots, and researchers knew that we were at the end of a cycle in a “solar minimum” or quiet period–but that somnolence has continued for an extra year beyond the point at which researchers expected sunspot activity to resume. Comments Australian astronomer Phil Wilkinson: “We have had a drought of sunspots…. This is the longest period the sun has been quiet since the start of the Space Age. Seeing the sun doing nothing is really exciting,” he said, adding it made physicists wonder how little they really understood.

Humility is always good in science. Now they have a theory.

Now, new observations announced at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society reveal a possible explanation: “sluggish” solar jet streams 4,350 miles below the surface of the sun. Every 11 years, the sun simultaneously generates twin streams of plasma at each of its poles. Unlike the jet streams on Earth, the solar versions are magnetized and travel only toward the equator. This migration takes place very slowly–at about 10 kilometers per hour. For reasons still not understood, when the streams reach 22 degrees of latitude, north and south, they touch off a new solar cycle, and the sunspots reappear.

But there’s a problem.

As for why the jet stream was moving slower than usual–well, researchers don’t have an answer for that yet. But there are a lot of things that researchers don’t yet understand about the sun’s behavior.

I stumbled across this article from 2006:

A parasitic microbe commonly found in cats might have helped shape entire human cultures by manipulating the personalities of infected individuals, according to a new study.

Infection by a Toxoplasma gondii could make some individuals more prone to some forms of neuroticism and could lead to differences among cultures if enough people are infected, says Kevin Lafferty, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a survey of different countries, Lafferty found that people living in those with higher rates of T. gondii infection scored higher on average for neuroticism, defined as an emotional or mental disorder characterized by high levels of anxiety, insecurity or depression.

His finding is detailed in the Aug. 2 issue of the journal for Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology.

Manipulating behavior

T. gondii infects both wild and domestic cats, but it is carried by many warm-blooded mammals. One recent study showed that the parasite makes normally cautious rats outgoing and more prone to engage in reckless behavior, such as hanging around areas frequently marked by cat urine, making the rats easy targets.

Scientists estimate that the parasite has infected about 3 billion people, or about half of the human population. Studies by researchers in the Czech Republic have suggested T. gondii might have subtle but long-term effects on its human hosts. The parasite is thought to have different, and often opposite effects in men versus women, but both genders appear to develop a form of neuroticism called “guilt proneness.”

Popular Science

After breaking his neck in a 1997 fall, Israeli engineer Amit Goffer learned that he would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He soon concluded that this mode of transportation was outdated and began work on the ReWalk, the only wearable exoskeleton that allows paraplegics to stand, amble, and even climb stairs. Soon, more than a dozen patients in the U.S. will strap in and start strolling.

Goffer, now 56, needed a design that would be not only safe but also energy-efficient enough to last for an entire day. “I was worried you would need a truckload of batteries,” he recalls. To solve that problem, he made a design choice that meant he could never use it. Goffer is paralyzed from the chest down, but he realized that if wearers could use crutches, it would conserve energy and simplify balance, since the device wouldn’t have to keep the person upright all on its own.

The 44-pound prototype, which takes just a few minutes to get into, has several modes—among them, walking, sitting, and climbing/descending stairs—that the user selects on a wristband controller. Plant one of the crutches and lean forward in walk mode, for example, and a tilt sensor in the ReWalk’s shoulder harness registers the motion. A computer in a backpack interprets this data and instructs electric motors in the hip and knee of one leg to move it forward. (Other exoskeletons, like Honda’s walking-assist device, take cues from users’ actual leg motions or electrical signals in their muscles, which wouldn’t work with paraplegics.) Another plant of the crutches and another lean, and the motors on the other side swing the second leg ahead. Stand up straight, and the
device halts.

From William Castleman:

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Discover:

The concern over the declining honeybee population may be exaggerated, according to a controversial new study that shows their numbers are actually increasing globally. Alarm over a world pollination crisis is thus unfounded, say the researchers who analyzed Food and Agriculture Organization data and found that commercial domesticated bee hives have increased 45 percent in the past 50 years, to match growing demand for honey among a growing human population

Mental arithmetic became easier after volunteers had been given large amounts of compounds found in chocolate, called flavanols, in a hot cocoa drink.

They were also less likely to feel tired or mentally drained, the findings, presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference in Brighton show.

Prof David Kennedy, director of the brain, performance and nutrition research centre at Northumbria University, and a co-author of the study, said that chocolate could be beneficial for mentally challenging tasks.

The findings suggest students who binge on chocolate when revising for exams may gain a real benefit from doing so.

Tastes good, too.